Pages

Friday, February 5, 2010

Every other Friday we clean our home and that means I get some six hours of pretty uninterrupted podcast listening done. Here I will give you an idea what I listened to this morning. Most of these podcasts will soon get a more extensive review.

MMW 5 - Revolution, Industry & Empire (UCSD) - I nearly missed out on the fact that this course is brought this semester. Professor Heidi Keller-Lapp is lecturing about world history between (roughly) 1750 and 1914 (feed). The goal is to show how in this period Europe came to dominate the world. This is a lecture course that one could listen to in conjunction with History 5 from Berkeley, History 1c from UCLA and European Civilization from Yale (see my post on Courses in Modern History) and get a very complete academic picture.

In Our Time (BBC) - This week's show about Ibn Khaldun. Very interesting as usual. I admire Melvyn Bragg's facility to get the job done in 40 minutes.

Europe from its Origins - A new history podcast I recently discovered (feed). This is a series on enhanced podcasts and vodcasts about the early history of Europe. Host Joe Hogarty gives a bit of a monotonous reading, but other than that does an impressive job in making the bridge between the Romans and the Middle Ages. Today I finished the fifth lecture in which he arrived at Charles Martell. Hogarty is the first to have taught me in such a clear fashion how the Western Roman world shifted to western Europe and gradually developed into the Europe we know from more familiar history - say the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Next I listened a bit to two lectures but eventually skipped them. The third lecture of the Berkeley Series about Human Rights and the Tenth lecture in the UCSD series about the Byzantine Empire.

Then I heard the fifth lecture in History 151cThe peculiar modernity of Britain (Berkeley) which is a very interesting and entertaining series with Professor James Vernon (feed). This lecture among others dealt with the Indian Revolt of 1857 which made for some fine comparative material with two series by Professor Vinay Lal at UCLA. (see also review by DIY Scholar)

And if it had to be like that, the next lecture was by Lal The History of British India (UCLA) the lecture of last Tuesday (2 February). Here Lal arrives at what promises to be the most interesting part of his series: the colonialism with knowledge. This is also the subject of his doctorate. He will show how the British colonialized also by colonializing the realm of knowledge. And in many ways one may argue that until this day the colonialzed knowledge still rules, that is, in this world in which Britain is no longer a power and the Western hegemony is receding, the Western style science is still an unchallenged authority. I am sure Lal will arrive at this point as well.

Eventually I heard a bit of France Since 1871 (Yale) in which Professor John Merriman started a lecture about the French culture of drink. But then my time was up and I will have to continue later.

The most elite of the podcast reviewers (and most especially in the History genre). We use Anne is a Man! as a sort of barometer for how we are doing. Anne is a Man can assume the role of THE podcast reviewer on line; no one does it as well as he does.